oft: Bash function for opening a specific filetype

Here’s another simple Bash function that I’ve used so much recently I thought I should share. It’s called oft, which stands for Open File Type, and can be used as a standalone shell script or as a function in your .bash_profile. When run, it looks in the current directory for files with extensions that match (or partially match) the first argument and opens them.

My most obvious use case is Xcode projects, where I may have dozens (and dozens) of files, but there’s only one .xcodeproj file (folder). I don’t always know the name of the project in the folder, but if I run oft xco it will open it without my having to search. If there is more than one result, it gives you a numeric menu to select the file you want to open. You can cancel, select a single file or “Open ALL” from that menu. If you run oft with no arguments, it will read a (partial) extension from a prompt.

This is a script born of laziness (so many good ones are, though). You can accomplish the same with an ls *.ext, spot the file and open filename.ext. This is just faster and better for me when I’m working with less-than-optimal amounts of sleep.